Session 2:
06/04/24
1-3pm
Presenters: Dan Byrne-Smith, Donna Matthews with Antónis Kastellaní, Nina Danino
Dan Byrne-Smith
Bio
Dr Dan Byrne-Smith is an artist and writer who lives in the New Forest and is training to become an existential psychotherapist, studying for a DProf at NSPC in London. His published work includes writings on art, science fiction and critical utopianism. He is the author (as Dan Smith) of Traces of Modernity and is the editor of Science Fiction: Documents of Contemporary Art. He was formerly a senior lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Presentation: The Sickness Unto Death
For this event, he will be performing a collaborative reading of the beginning of Kierkegaard’s essay The Sickness Unto Death. This Christian work, which is also a precursor to modern existential thought, explores despair as a kind of spiritual death. Despair can be negated, he argues, through a relational approach to self. The collaborative reading of his text is offered as a space of relational affect.
Donna Matthews
![]()
Bio
Donna Matthews is an improviser and video artist currently in her final year of a practice-based PhD in Music at the university of Glasgow. Interested in issues such as poetic intuition, inspiration, and gift, her work explores how the intuitive state might be conveyed through aesthetic form, whilst also exploring improvisation as a means of 'undoing form' to experience the inspired state.
Antónis Kastellaní
![]()
Bio
Antónis Kastellaní is a singer and multi instrumentalist whose work has focused on establishing links between traditional and experimental music. Interested in the meeting points of improvisation as composition, his work bridges formalism with the unforeseen and spontaneous. www.antoniskastellani.com
Presentation: Blood Echoes – a performance by Nina Danino, Antónis Kastellaní and Donna Matthews.
Incorporating singing, improvisation and glossolalia, with text from Anaïs Nin, and drawing from Simone Weil’s notion of attentiveness as a mode of prayer, Blood Echoes facilitates a site where the shift from self-preoccupation to unselfconsciousness can be explored. This liminal state shares much in common with flow – and relates to scholar Lewis Hyde’s notion of gifted states; where the artist has a sense of being a receiver – rather than a creator.
Nina Danino
![]()
Bio
Nina Danino is a filmmaker and artist. Her feature film Solitude (2022) on Nico as icon, screen and poet is a diptych and sister film to MARIA (2023) on Maria Callas which presents her transfigured in a visual iconostasis. She is Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.
ninadanino.co.uk
Solitude Trailers/LUX interview
MARIA Trailer/LUX interview The Myth and Cult of Maria Callas.
Presentation: Ash Ra Tempel
My films and soundtracks (not all) have sought visionaries and mystics, saints and jouissance. I inscribe myself into rock psychedelia. I am performing karaoke to Ash Ra Tempel’s “Light: Look at Your Sun” from the album Schwingungen (1972). Ash Ra Tempel’s music is also in the film soundtrack of Solitude (2022).
with thanks to Revd Stephen Baxter and Elizabeth Maragh
![]()
![]()
![]()
1-3pm
Presenters: Dan Byrne-Smith, Donna Matthews with Antónis Kastellaní, Nina Danino
Dan Byrne-Smith
Bio
Dr Dan Byrne-Smith is an artist and writer who lives in the New Forest and is training to become an existential psychotherapist, studying for a DProf at NSPC in London. His published work includes writings on art, science fiction and critical utopianism. He is the author (as Dan Smith) of Traces of Modernity and is the editor of Science Fiction: Documents of Contemporary Art. He was formerly a senior lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London.
Presentation: The Sickness Unto Death
For this event, he will be performing a collaborative reading of the beginning of Kierkegaard’s essay The Sickness Unto Death. This Christian work, which is also a precursor to modern existential thought, explores despair as a kind of spiritual death. Despair can be negated, he argues, through a relational approach to self. The collaborative reading of his text is offered as a space of relational affect.
Donna Matthews
Bio
Donna Matthews is an improviser and video artist currently in her final year of a practice-based PhD in Music at the university of Glasgow. Interested in issues such as poetic intuition, inspiration, and gift, her work explores how the intuitive state might be conveyed through aesthetic form, whilst also exploring improvisation as a means of 'undoing form' to experience the inspired state.
Antónis Kastellaní
Bio
Antónis Kastellaní is a singer and multi instrumentalist whose work has focused on establishing links between traditional and experimental music. Interested in the meeting points of improvisation as composition, his work bridges formalism with the unforeseen and spontaneous. www.antoniskastellani.com
Presentation: Blood Echoes – a performance by Nina Danino, Antónis Kastellaní and Donna Matthews.
Incorporating singing, improvisation and glossolalia, with text from Anaïs Nin, and drawing from Simone Weil’s notion of attentiveness as a mode of prayer, Blood Echoes facilitates a site where the shift from self-preoccupation to unselfconsciousness can be explored. This liminal state shares much in common with flow – and relates to scholar Lewis Hyde’s notion of gifted states; where the artist has a sense of being a receiver – rather than a creator.
Nina Danino
Bio
Nina Danino is a filmmaker and artist. Her feature film Solitude (2022) on Nico as icon, screen and poet is a diptych and sister film to MARIA (2023) on Maria Callas which presents her transfigured in a visual iconostasis. She is Reader in Fine Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.
ninadanino.co.uk
Solitude Trailers/LUX interview
MARIA Trailer/LUX interview The Myth and Cult of Maria Callas.
Presentation: Ash Ra Tempel
My films and soundtracks (not all) have sought visionaries and mystics, saints and jouissance. I inscribe myself into rock psychedelia. I am performing karaoke to Ash Ra Tempel’s “Light: Look at Your Sun” from the album Schwingungen (1972). Ash Ra Tempel’s music is also in the film soundtrack of Solitude (2022).
with thanks to Revd Stephen Baxter and Elizabeth Maragh
